A Weekend in Fayetteville | North Carolina Weekend | UNC-TV

Fayetteville's a little big town. You get the feel of the big city, but you still have that peace and quiet of a smaller hometown. You've got beautiful natural places, botanical gardens, the food scene is amazing. You can't deny the military influence on our community. The military brings in thousands of new faces to our communities every year. We really love this community and how it really embraces a melting pot of different cultures and identities and we all have it represented here. I like to say that Fayetteville is my adopted hometown. You find your second family, essentially. That's what this city does best, like better than any other city in the world, because of the people here. I didn't think after my tour in the Army that I would stay. That wasn't my plan, but Fayetteville certainly grew on me and I enjoy Fayetteville and this is my home. Fayetteville was two small villages on the Cape Fear River, it was Campbellton, and where we're sitting now was Cross Creek. And after the American Revolution, the General Assembly combined the two villages and called it Fayetteville. We're the first city in the United States named for the Marquis de Lafayette and he was a young French nobleman that came to the aid of the colonies during the Revolution. That's where we get our name. A lot of people don't realize that our history predates the Revolutionary War and so you really cannot turn a corner here without tripping over our vast history. Behind us is the Market House and on that site stood the State House where the United States Constitution was ratified, bringing North Carolina in as the 12th state in 1789. We have museums. I'm the director of the Fayetteville Transportation Local History Museum, which is a local history museum. The Museum of the Cape Fear is a regional North Carolina museum. We have the Airborne and Special Operations Museum. On post we have the Special Forces Museum and the 82nd Airborne Museum. So there's a lot of culture here, a lot to learn. Fayetteville is full of cultural diversity, but because of the military influence, we've also traveled and the majority of our community has traveled all over the world. So you get to be in this community that is bringing back these unique thoughts and ideas and experiences from all these different cultures and all these different parts of the globe. So it's really cool. I grew up in Puerto Rico and baseball is, I mean, it's the sport. I love the energy here. This is a social event every game because you see so many friends and the music, the game, the players. Vamos Sierra! I am that crazy Puerto Rican lady. So welcome to Sager Stadium, the brand new $40.2 million stadium right in the heart of downtown Fayetteville. This is the home of the Houston Astros' Class A Advanced Minor League Baseball affiliate. Babe Ruth actually hit his first professional home run in baseball only a few miles away from this exact spot. So Fayetteville is truly the home of the all-American sport of baseball. To be here and to see families coming down Hay Street, excited about coming to a baseball game and stopping in one of the businesses to grab something to eat before they come into the stadium or, oh, there's something that I want to get for grandma from one of the local boutiques. It's really special to see this wonderful embracing. We get to see so much diversity and I love that. I think it's really good. Lake Pine Swim Club. It's a spring-fed lake. There's diving boards, slides, grills, volleyball, horseshoe, ladder ball, basketball. We offer a lot of different things for people to play, to do. There are people who say, I've lived here for 40 years, I didn't know this was here. We're here in beautiful, lovely Carver's Falls. This is our 70-plus acre piece of land here in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that holds, as USA Today called us, one of the top 10 zip lines in the country. You're going to have fun, you're going to learn something about the environment, and you're going to spend two and a half hours in the trees and suspension bridges and nature like you've never done before. We're excited to bring something kind of different, something new to our city. We are Cornerstone Design Company, and we build custom furniture, we have home decor and lifestyle items, and we just launched our own candle line in the beginning of March. We have candle-making workshops every single weekend. They are BYOB, so you can bring your wine and go through our candle library. We have $0.32, and you get to hand-pour your own coconut wax candles. So now you are officially a Chandler. Oh, that smells good. I can't wait. The draw to downtown Fayetteville has really come a long way. I love to take people to the downtown area. It's constantly growing. We even have an Art in Public Places program now, so people can walk around and see public art, and then of course the Arts Council. Some things that I like to do when I bring family and friends over, the Botanical Gardens is so beautiful, and of course local restaurants. There's a big foodie scene here. We love to eat here in Fayetteville. I'm Chef Imani, owner of Straight Drop Seafood and Drop by the River Seafood. We have large platters, the biggest seafood platters in Fayetteville. If you don't know, we're known for our crack sauce, our drop sauce, and our drop seasoning. I created that about three years ago out of my house in Georgia, where Straight Drop originally got started. We have savory and sweet pies. We like to say you can get pie with a side of pie. The recipes are kind of an amalgamation of our imaginations, some of our traditional upbringings. For example, I was brought up in Missouri, so I've got homestyle chicken pot pie, your beef pot pie, things like that, and then as we work together with basically anybody who would work for us in the kitchen would say, why don't you try this, or why don't you try that. I did this tribute wall here at the Fayetteville Pie Company. Customers who would come in can see a little bit of the history, and also a tribute to my grandma. We like to use real butter, real sugar, real flour and everything, because we want it to taste just like it's being home-baked. It's coming straight from your grandma's kitchen. We like to drink beer, and beer costs money, so two things one time. Make your own beer, save money, make money at the same time. Here at is Bright Light Brewing Company downtown in Fayetteville. We're right across from the city hall in the heart of downtown. It's a micro-brewery at this point. We've actually concocted about 18 different types of beer. Of course, they're all ales, but we go from the light beer all the way to the dark. Try to tie everything in with having good beer, but also be a family-friendly establishment, because we all have kids ourselves. The history and heroes, hometown feeling, you certainly have that, because Fayetteville isn't so big that you don't have that hometown feeling. You experience that right here in the downtown area. Lots of heroes have come out of Fayetteville, and lots of history has been made in Fayetteville. All of those things are right here in Fayetteville. Again, if you're traveling on 95 and don't make that stop here in Fayetteville, you've really missed something. For more information about things to do in Fayetteville, go to visitfayettevillenc.com.